Cloud Digital Leader Fundamental Cloud Concepts Practice Question
A developer wants a fully managed environment to deploy containerized applications without managing the underlying infrastructure. They need auto-scaling, load balancing, and a serverless experience. Which Google Cloud service should they choose?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Cloud Run
Cloud Run is a fully managed, serverless container platform that auto-scales, handles load balancing, and charges only for resources used. It abstracts all infrastructure management.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Google Kubernetes Engine
Why it's wrong here
GKE is a managed Kubernetes service but not fully serverless. Developers still need to provision node pools, manage cluster capacity, and handle underlying VM instance lifecycle, OS updates, and autoscaling configuration. This operational overhead means it is not a fully managed environment for deploying containers without infrastructure responsibilities.
- ✗
Compute Engine
Why it's wrong here
Compute Engine is an IaaS offering where developers are responsible for creating and patching VMs, configuring the OS, installing runtimes, and designing scaling policies. It requires ongoing infrastructure management such as disk, networking, and firewall configuration, so it cannot provide the fully managed, serverless deployment experience the developer wants.
- ✗
App Engine Standard
Why it's wrong here
App Engine Standard is indeed serverless and fully managed, but it imposes a restrictive runtime sandbox that only supports specific languages, library versions, and web frameworks. It does not let developers package arbitrary containers with custom system libraries or binaries, whereas Cloud Run accepts any OCI-compatible container and offers more flexibility for running existing containerized workloads.
- ✓
Cloud Run
Why this is correct
Cloud Run is a fully managed serverless container platform that automatically scales instances from zero, handles load balancing and security, and requires no cluster or node management. Developers can deploy any stateless container and pay only for the CPU and memory used during requests, making it the best fit for a fully managed deployment without infrastructure operations.
Quick reference
Cloud Service Model Comparison
| Model | You Manage | Provider Manages | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| IaaS | OS, runtime, apps, data | Hardware, hypervisor, networking | EC2, Azure VMs, GCP Compute Engine |
| PaaS | Apps and data | OS, runtime, middleware, hardware | Elastic Beanstalk, Azure App Service |
| SaaS | Data and settings only | Everything else | Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Workday |
| FaaS / Serverless | Function code only | Infra, scaling, runtime | Lambda, Azure Functions, Cloud Run |
| CaaS | Containers and apps | Kubernetes, OS, hardware | EKS, AKS, GKE |
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Cloud Digital Transformation
Key term
Container
A container is a lightweight, standalone software package that includes everything needed to run an application, such as code, runtime, system tools, and libraries.
Key term
Serverless
Serverless is a cloud computing model where the cloud provider manages the servers, and you only pay for the actual compute time your code uses, without having to worry about provisioning or maintaining infrastructure.
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every GCDL question from scratch — 829 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This GCDL practice question is part of Courseiva's free Google Cloud certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the GCDL exam.